Fondly, Pennsylvania

Fondly, Pennsylvania is a joint blog of HSP's archives, conservation, and digitization departments. Here you will find posts on our latest projects and newest discoveries, as well as how we care for, describe, and preserve our collections. Whether you are doing research or just curious to know more about the behind-the-scenes work that goes on at HSP, please read, explore, and join the conversation!

Yesterday, April 5th, 2011, we at HSP hosted an event for the new, Musical Finding Aid. What does this mean, you ask? Do not fret, if all your questions aren't answered in the next paragraphs please leave a comment!

Before SEPTA, public transportation in the city was largely the responsibility of the Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) and its predecessor, the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company (PRT). HSP's Harold E.

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of my time focused on a fairly technical topic: text encoding.

Basically, text encoding is a method for representing text in a digital form. It allows you to record information about text -- for example, whether it is handwritten, or mentions someone’s name, or is the salutation of a letter -- right alongside the text itself.

As interesting as it can be to process a large collection of papers from an individual or organization, I find processing small collections just as satisfying, if not more so. It’s true that small collections can be difficult to process since sometimes there’s not enough information in them to form coherent background or scope notes, but that’s not the case with the Mrs. Stacy B.

My internship at HSP consists of two primary projects that will hopefully contribute to planning a digital preservation strategy: 1) Identifying materials within the collections that exist on digital formats, such as CDs and DVDs, and migrating the files to a separate, secure location, as well as identifying materials that exist on legacy formats, such as 3.5” and 5.25” floppy disks, WANG disks, audio cassette tapes, VHS tapes, open reel tapes, etc., and researching migration and/or emulation solutions to ensure their preservation; and 2) Interviewing the staff of HSP to determine the types of digital files that are being created during the course of business, how and where they are saved, and what is being done with them.

Arranging work on the Albert M. Greenfield papers is almost done but we have lots of work to do to complete the finding aid. This collection is very large, so it’s taking us a lot of time to input the collection’s data into Archivists’ Toolkit, the software we’re using here to create EAD finding aids.

One of my all time favorite TV series isConnections, created by science historian James Burke. In each show, he delved into the history of science, invention, and culture to present connections between seemingly unrelated people, places, and objects. Though not quite in the same vein as Burke's connections, in the archives, we regularly come across connections among our collections. Now relationships between collections of family papers may seem ob

It is great to be back at HSP, this time in a more formal role as Rights and Reproductions Coordinator. I oversee all the requests for images for use in research, publications, and exhibitions. While a lot of paperwork is involved in the process, there are some tasks that have taught me more about HSP and its holdings.